In her reqular weekly column, Lynne Truss discusses why travelling the world
in the guise of ‘The Apostrophe Lady’ isn’t as glamorous as it sounds

My mood veers back and forth between dread and expectation. For much of each day I fantasise about leaving the country. I also gather the dog into my arms and chew his ears (gently) while staring into the middle distance. Obviously, the best thing is to keep one’s mind on something else, such as laundry, or baking, or conquering complex nautical knots with a specially-acquired length of stout rope with tar on the ends – but I’m too worked up. The thing is, I am facing publication. On February 27, I have anovel coming out – and yes, it’s a short one; and yes, it’s a comic horror novella about a talking cat called Roger; so yes, there is very little chance it will be under consideration for theMan Booker Prize, so a potential layer of author anxiety can automatically be stripped away. But it is nevertheless a book I wrote out of my own head, and I naturally feel protective of it, while recognising there is nothing I can do but wave from the shore to this frail little bark (with my name on it) as it bravely breasts the grey-green waves under a darkening sky. “God speed, little book!” I call into the wind. And then I run back indoors, because it’s freezing.

I always used to warn new writers not to expect too much on publication. “Brace yourself; it’s a total let-down,” I would say. But then came Eats, Shoots & Leaves (10 years ago now, thank heavens), and an absolutely surreal thing happened: I experienced at first hand what publication would feel like if absolutely everything went right, and I’ve never really trusted in normality since then. The reviews were absurdly enthusiastic; the sales were instantly astronomical; people genuinely said to one another, “Now, what would you like for Christmas, apart from that little book on punctuation, which goes without saying?” I was awarded honorary degrees; I was invited to a G8 summit; my book was the basis of a set of questions on University Challenge; I was awarded “Book of the Year”. In America, my book stayed on the bestseller lists for 46 weeks; I spoke (about punctuation, don’t forget) to packed theatres across America and Canada, and at Radio City Music Hall. Through all this craziness, not surprisingly, I often took stock. And in the end I concluded I was actually having a near-death experience. This was the only explanation. In reality, I had tripped over a cat at the top of the stairs just after completing the book, and the rest was entirely down to over-excited neurons.

All the while this stuff was going on, people would say, “It must be great,” and I’m afraid I would shatter their illusions by saying that in actual fact I was biding my time until it was over. The impact on my finances was, of course, extremely welcome. But there were many aspects of success that made me uncomfortable – mainly, that other people were in control of how much exposure I got; also, that having spent my whole professional life avoiding pigeon-holes, I was now digging my own grave as the Apostrophe Lady. I admit that I got over-dramatic about this, but it was a big issue. The attitude of others was that any sane author would surely be glad to be The Apostrophe Lady in perpetuity if it meant she could buy a yacht. My own attitude entailed invoking the speech made by John Proctor in The Crucible: “Because it is my name!” I would cry. “Because I cannot have another in my life!”

Such histrionics won’t be necessary this time, I hope. And there are other reasons – much more realistic ones – to dread publication, in any case. Terrible reviews, or none at all. Long faces on all the people who believed in you. No one wanting to commission another book. Worst of all, going into bookshops and finding that, on the fiction shelves, there is nobody between Joanna Trollope andScott Turow (which is, alphabetically, where my book would go). Funnily enough, I once met Scott Turow at a Northern California Kidney Foundation fund-raising lunch in Sacramento (I know, I know), and I told him that the most efficient way to check whether my books were on the fiction shelves in British bookshops was to look for his books and then glance quickly to the left while holding my breath. He looked pained and disbelieving when I told him this. But sadly, it was true.